


An Impossible View

by Shay_Fae



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Baggage, Fix-It of Sorts, Forgiveness Arch, Hurt/Comfort, James Potter & Lily Evans Potter Live, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Post-First War with Voldemort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-19 00:06:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29617536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shay_Fae/pseuds/Shay_Fae
Summary: After the war, Remus tries to move on.Or, it takes more than an ocean to stop Sirius Black from getting what he want.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 41
Kudos: 62





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from "Me & My Dog" by the unbelievably talented boygenius.

Remus can see the figure sitting on the front steps of his little rowhouse as soon as he turns the corner, but it takes him until he’s standing at the edge of the walkway to fully comprehend that it’s Sirius. It’s fall in Boston and the air is so crisp and bright it feels like it could be bitten and Sirius is sitting with his knees to his chin, his skinny arms crossed around the frayed edges at the bottom of his jeans.

“Pads,” Remus says, and then runs out of things to say.

“Wotcher, Moony,” Sirius says. Black strands are slipping out of the haphazard bun perched at the top of his head and he looks closer to fifteen than twenty five. “Can I come in?”

“Er- yes. Yes of course,” Remus says, running on pure muscle memory. “Let me just wash up and I’ll put the hot water on.”

He has to brush against Sirius to unlock the door, who scrambles up at the first press of contact and sticks his hands in his pockets. Maybe he tries to make eye contact, Remus doesn’t know, because Remus instead looks dead ahead as he gets the door open and lets Sirius slide inside.

It’s a nice flat, bigger than anywhere Remus ever lived in London. A couple lives on the second floor but Remus has the whole first floor to himself- living room with a jumble of thrifted sofas and armchairs, kitchen with its small window and herbs growing in little vases on the sill, bathroom with a mostly-working shower, and the one bedroom tucked away at the end of the hall. Remus loves it; loves sitting in the mauve velvet wingback he found at Goodwill with a cuppa and his coursework, watching college kids and young families walk up and down the tree-lined block, loves smoking in the clawfoot white tub that’s maybe been there since the revolution, drifting in and out of a not-quite sleep as he hears the couple upstairs put their baby to bed.

Watching Sirius pick his way through Remus’s haphazardly stacked piles of books and his clashing throw blankets is almost too much, so Remus locks the door behind them and heads straight into the kitchen, trying his hardest not to think at all as he fills the little kettle under the tap and sets it on the stove. 

“It’s really pretty,” Sirius says, and Remus turns to find him standing in the doorway, almost intentionally not leaning against the frame. “The flat, I mean. Looks like a proper adult lives here.”

“I try to be,” Remus says, and now they’re just staring at each other, the small kitchen only giving them a foot or two of space between themselves. It’s been almost two years, Remus thinks, since they last saw each other and only for a few minutes then, and Sirius looks too real at the edges in an overlarge red jumper that Remus recognizes from where it often graced the floor of their dorm room.

“Are you hungry?” Remus asks, just to have something to say, and Sirius nods like any of this is normal.

“If you have something small, I’d eat,” he says.

Remus is fairly sure there’s food in the fridge. It’d been a wonder, his first year on a PhD stipend, to realize he could reliably put food on the table six nights out of seven. It’s still a novelty now, to open his fridge and pull out a bag of oranges, one of which he hands to Sirius, both of them careful not to let their fingertips touch.

“Thanks,” Sirius says, and for a while the only sound in the kitchen is the gentle scrape as Sirius peels the fruit and the wind whipping up the old trees in the backyard. Eventually, the kettle whistles and Sirius finishes peeling, and Remus is halfway through making the second cup with milk and two sugars before he thinks maybe Sirius’s tea preferences have changed.

But Sirius takes the cup in his free hand and declares it “perfect,” so they walk back into the living room and take two of the seats- Remus in his wingback and Sirius on the blue fabric couch. 

“I hope you weren’t waiting long,” Remus says, which is an absurd thing to say because he wasn’t expecting Sirius, they had made no plans, but it feels less absurd than asking _what are you doing here_ or _what do you want from me_. 

“It was nice,” Sirius shrugs. Outside the bay window it’s dark, the street lit by the looming lamps lost to the late-night fog that drifts in off the bay. “You know I love to people watch.”

Remus thinks he might not know anything about Sirius anymore, although some days it feels like Sirius and James and even Peter are so stitched into his muscle memory that he’ll be ninety before he can look at a flower or a piece of fruit and not know what each of them would say about it. This might be Sirius’s first time in the States, Remus realizes, and he cannot parse out why that feels significant.

“Is everything alright?” Remus finally asks, watching Sirius balance his mug on his knees as he struggles to separate two orange slices from each other.

Sirius gets the piece in his mouth then and chews before he answers, holding his mug with his left hand. “I mean,” he starts, “not really, no.”

Remus’s blood runs cold and Sirius must see it immediately because he scrambles to add, “Sorry, sorry, everyone is safe. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean- everyone’s fine. James and Lily are good, Harry’s fine yes.”

It’s a different kind of hurt to hear all their names in Sirius’s mouth, but Remus feels his heartbeat slow back down again. No one has heard or seen Voldemort in three years but the fear of the war hasn’t quite left Remus’s system. 

“I just meant,” Sirius stutters, and he looks down into the milky tea as he speaks. “Personally. I’m not...doing the best.”

Remus says nothing, waits for Sirius to string together his sentences together in a method Remus has employed countless times since they were boys at Hogwarts. Sirius would always figure himself out if given enough time and space.

As if on cue, Sirius sighs and looks up to meet Remus’s eyes for the first time. His grey eyes are a shock, their impossible depth, and they catch Remus’s own in a vice grip. Remus’s hands clenching around his cup.

“I can’t...that is, I don’t really want to be in London right now,” Sirius says. “Just for a little while. And I know we haven’t been...what I mean is I know I have no right but I was really hoping I could-”

“Yes,” Remus says, surprising them both, himself perhaps most of all because he thinks he genuinely means it. “Of course you can stay.” 

He puts Sirius on the couch, that first night, after they finish their tea in near silence. Remus digs out a spare sheet and pillow from the little linen closet in the hall and Sirius takes them in his arms with a soft “thanks” before Remus all but bolts to safety behind the closed door of his room. 

Alone in his bed, Remus stares up at his pale white ceiling and listens to the sounds of the couple upstairs walking across the floorboards and, more faintly, Sirius moving around the flat and the creak of the couch as a weight settles into it. The awareness of Sirius sleeping in just the other room keeps him awake for mindless hours, watching the shadows stretch themselves against the wall. Sometime close the three in the morning, Remus stirs and hears hesitant footsteps making their way down the hall to the bathroom and for a brief moment he’s nineteen again and in London, poorer than he’d ever been in his life and so unnaturally confident that things would work out just fine. He turns over in his sheets and falls back asleep.

In the morning, Remus finds the dog curled up under the red knit blanket, and Padfoot blinks his eyes open as Remus slips his shoes on, his tail just barely thumping against the cushions. 

“I have an early morning lecture,” Remus explains, unsure why he’s whispering in the soft light. “But I’ll be back later today. Make yourself at home.”

He doesn’t quite run out the door but it’s a near thing, and he does walk briskly from the house to the alley outside his wards where he can apparate to the campus. The Institute shares its campus with Harvard, a fact that nearly everyone but a few of the highest level board members are unaware of, and the classrooms are scattered throughout the oldest buildings, hidden between lecture halls in a bit of spellwork Remus recognized at once from Grimmauld Place.

Remus, two months into his third year, generally doesn’t take classes anymore with the exception of a Thursday night seminar, but he TAs for Advanced Magical Theory and Reimagining the Bestiary, the latter of which is taught Wednesday mornings at eight. Remus apparates into the small, designated room at the back of Massachusetts Hall, waves to the wizarding secretary Celeste, and rushes across the Yard to the seminar room where his students are already waiting.

“Good morning, sorry,” Remus pants, dropping his bag on the desk and fishing out chalk from his pocket. “Professor Isidore is still in Japan; he was bitten by an infected Kappa and is healing fine but more slowly than expected. Let’s talk about the reading, shall we?”

It’s an odd day. Remus feels only half present in his courses, answering students questions with vague responses and drifting off during his shift at the campus library. At two, he meets with his advisor to discuss an article Remus is writing on Yumboes as a foil to House Elves in sixteenth century literature, but he loses his train of thought enough times that Professor Carmilla asks him outright if he’s okay.

“Yeah, no, it’s just-” Remus struggles to explain. “Just going through some...personal stuff.”

Carmilla gives him a gentle look. “Moon troubles?” she asks, and Remus shakes his head. It’s well known within the department that Carmilla is a vampire but in general she takes great pains to hide it, maintaining a daywalker schedule and apparating between classrooms rather than teach night seminars. He’d opened up to her about his own Dark Being status early in his second year, when the Blue Moon had left Remus with a black eye and a broken arm, and she’d been nothing but kind and perhaps even too motherly about it, sending soup to his flat the morning after many a full.

Remus shakes his head and Carmilla smiles. “Love troubles?” she teases and Remus flushes even though it’s not true either. 

Remus wonders if she remembers how he’d acted that first semester when he’d just come to Boston, how he’d moved through his days in the same sort of fog he can feel encroaching on him again with Sirius’s sudden reappearance. He’d never consciously thought about leaving London, those first few months after the war. After Peter had been exposed as the secret keeper turned traitor, and Voldemort had vanished after some terrible altercation with the Longbottoms, Remus had been left standing in the rubble of his life with the implicit understanding that he was expected to rebuild it all to just as it’d been right out of Hogwarts- minus one rat. His body had been physically a wreck after nearly a year of full moons with violent packs across Britain, in fact he’d spent a good deal of the post-war celebratory months in an intensive care unit at St. Mungos. But more pressing had been the unraveling of the schemes and suspicions his friends, the only ones Remus had in the world, had been holding behind his back.

Remus had thought he could handle it, the terrible fact that they’d all- James and Sirius and even Lily at the end- had thought he was the spy. He’d spent almost year, in fact, living in that same bedsit in London, working odd jobs and going to pub nights when he was invited out. They’d all talked to him, of course, James taking him for long walks and Lily crying while she’d tried to make them dinner, apologizing over and over that they’d ever suspected him, that they’d lied to him for most of the war because they’d thought he was sneaking information to Voldemort. And Remus had told them all he forgave them, he understood they’d all done things during the war they weren’t proud of. He’d even thought he meant it. 

But it had festered, the betrayal, working at his skin and corroding his bones until one morning Remus had woken up and realized he had never felt so alone in the world- not even during the worst parts of the war when no one was speaking to him and he wasn’t sure why. 

He’d gone to Dumbledore then and cashed in one of the millions of favors the Old Man owed him by that point and not long after Harry’s second birthday, Remus had packed up everything he owned into two suitcases and left to start his graduate studies at the Grimoire Institute of Massachusetts Bay. Remus had let James and Sirius throw him a goodbye party and see him off to the portkey exchange station, he’d even gone back to London over his spring break his first year and had semi-uncomfortable lunches with old acquaintances. But over the last two years he’d let his letters back grow shorter and shorter until they became just holiday cards and, most recently, nursery pictures of Harry in his little white button-down. It was a slow bleeding, easier maybe than the blowout screaming match Remus sometimes imagined, but the result was the same. 

Instead, he built a new life for himself, filled with his courses and long meetings with Carmilla, and perfectly lovely dates with people he met in the library or at the pop-up farmers market, and nights where he did his very best not to think about the seven years he had been happier than he’d ever expected to be, surrounded by three boys who had promised to be his pack for life. 

Sirius, Remus should have figured, never really gave a shit about boundaries. 

“Something from London’s come back to haunt me,” Remus shares now and Carmilla laughs.

“A real haunting, or just a metaphorical one?” she asks, because they’re Bestiary Academics, and Remus laughs too.

“A bit of both, I think,” he says, and then tries again to explain his central thesis.

He stops at the store on the way home and comes back with an armful of produce. Remus almost expects to walk into an empty apartment, to discover that last night was some sort of anxiety hallucination, but Sirius is sitting on the couch and he drops the book he’s reading as soon as Remus walks in. Remus recognizes it from the spine as his own copy of _Brideshead Revisited_. 

“Can I help with anything?” Sirius asks, solicitous and standing too close. He smells like the apartment and his hair is wet, so he must have showered with Remus’s shampoo.

Remus shakes his head. “It’s just one bag,” he says, toeing off his shoes and moving towards the kitchen. “I figured we could cobble together some sort of stew for dinner, is that okay?”

“It sounds brilliant,” Sirius says, and he smiles with all his teeth.

They cook dinner together in the narrow kitchen, maneuvering around each other in careful choreography. Remus spells the record player to cycle through _Caribou_ and takes a sort of sharp-edged pleasure in humming along to _The Bitch is Back_ as he hands Sirius knives and root vegetables. 

Nothing about the two nights are the same-not the setting or the music or even the recipe- but Remus cannot help but think of the last time he cooked dinner with Sirius. It was during the early bits of the war- by the end they were barely spending three minutes together in the flat- and Sirius had come home with a bag of parsnips he’d gotten while stalking two Black cousins turned Death Eaters up north. They’d roasted them in the shitty old oven that barely worked even with magic and had gotten so drunk on cheap Firewhisky while waiting for the parsnips to cook that they’d forgotten all about them until they were so burned as to be nearly inedible.

Remus is surprised to realize it's a nice memory, that it leaves him feeling warm and a little nostalgic as he putters around the kitchen mincing garlic, Sirius present just at his back. Generally, Remus finds, when he indulges in old memories, they leave his mouth tasting sour and it is hard to just hold them as nice things he used to have rather than rights than had been forcibly stripped from him. Maybe it’s because Sirius is here, just at Remus’s elbow, but Remus cannot separate all of his disparate emotions from each other enough to tell.

“Do you still smoke?” Sirius asks while the stew is simmering and so Remus cranks the volume up and leaves the door open so they can listen while they smoke on the porch. Sirius pulls a pack of clove cigarettes out of the front pocket of his leather jacket and Remus laughs at him and takes one anyway and thinks this is the oddest dream he’s ever had, sitting with Sirius on his front steps and smoking out into the darkened streets of South Boston. 

“How’s Jamie?” Remus asks, to be polite. 

Sirius exhales. “Good, really good,” he says. “Moody’s promoting him, or threatening to anyway. They’ll make him Head Auror in like five years if he doesn’t slow down.”

“Good for him,” Remus says, remembering that first night James had come over the flat in his Auror uniform, so chuffed with himself he wouldn’t even take it off for dinner. “And Harry?”

“Still a button and a terror,” Sirius laughs. “He’s a real person now, you wouldn’t believe it. Got independent thoughts and everything. Took him to the V&A last week and he had like, intelligent things to say about the sculptures.”

Remus smiles, trying to picture it. Last he saw Harry in person, the littlest Potter was just mastering running and putting two and three word sentences together. 

“They’re thinking of going for a second, him and Lils,” Sirius volunteers. 

“Like on purpose?”

“I know!” Sirius says and it’s good, Remus thinks. Better than he thought it would feel.

They finish their cigarettes and Sirius goes back for the pack, fishing out one for himself before offering the box at Remus, who shakes his head. Cloves are stronger than the cheap Pall Malls Remus gets around the corner, and he can feel his head just a little detached from the nicotine. 

“I’d go half,” he says, almost entirely out of habit, but Sirius does not even blink, just hands Remus the cigarette and lighter and puts the pack away. Remus gets it lit, though his hands shake imperceptibly as he remembers countless nights of that same exchange, him and Sirius sharing a cigarette out their fire escape or in front of a club in Camden or later, towards the end of the war, in the alley behind Marlene’s place where the Order used to meet. By that point, smoking together was the most contact he and Sirius would have with each other for weeks. 

He passes it over too quickly and if Sirius is thinking about those same nights he doesn’t show it, his thumb and forefinger just barely brushing Remus’s in the handoff. 

Sirius smokes the same, Remus thinks, as he watches his oldest friend inhale with that quick little gasp he’s done since they learned to smoke together in third year. Remus stares for a beat and then realizes he’s just watching Sirius’s mouth and turns back to stare instead at the empty street. 

“Are you gonna tell me what you’re running from?” Remus asks and Sirius passes him the cigarette. The end is just barely damp from Sirius’s mouth when Remus gets it between his own lips and it’s the oldest thrill in the world.

Sirius squeezes the fingers of his left hand with his right where they hang between his spread knees, and speaks with the air of a man in confession.

“I quit the Aurors,” he says. Remus breathes out, lets the nicotine hit the back of his brain. 

“Oh?”

“And...I ended things. With Mary,” Sirius adds and Remus says nothing. He’d known the two of them were nearly engaged from Lily’s letters- the only one from the old gang who still writes Remus pages even though he mostly responds in a paragraph. Lily had described them as _engaged to be engaged_ and when Remus had read that, the letter had started to smolder in his hands in a bit of wordless magic that took Remus a while to notice. 

“We were living together, you know, so I’ve moved out of the flat but I’m not-“ Sirius bites his bottom lip, his right hand clenching. “I’m storing my stuff in Prong’s basement, for now. Just till I figure out where I’m going.”

Remus passes him the cigarette and Sirius takes it with a soft “thanks,” inhaling in that same quick gasp and exhaling with a shaking breath. Remus watches the smoke dissipate and intentionally does not think about Mary.

Sirius, right on cue, fills the silence. “Jamie thinks I’m having a quarter-life crisis.”

“Are you?” Remus asks and Sirius actually laughs.

“Maybe,” he says, and he turns to Remus to reveal he’s smiling, just at the corner of his mouth. He hands Remus the cigarette back just like that, facing him, and Remus smokes while watching back, turning only so he doesn’t exhale smoke in Sirius’s face.

“Have you ever felt like- like you were being paid to play the role of your own life?” Sirius starts all of a sudden, and it’s unclear if he’s even talking to Remus anymore. “And yes, objectively, you are killing this performance, you are acting your fucking heart out but that’s all it is? An act?”

The cigarette burns out in between Remus’s fingers. “All the time,” he offers, though Sirius doesn’t deserve it. 

As if he can read Remus’s mind, Sirius sighs and says, all in a rush, “You have no reason to believe me, but I’m a better person than I used to be.”

“I didn’t say-” Remus says, but Sirius doesn’t let him finish.

“I don’t want you to think, like, my life fell apart and that’s why I came here,” he says.

“That’s exactly what happened,” Remus says, but there’s no malice in it, he’s not actually offended, although perhaps he should be. 

“No, I mean, yes okay that is the order of things that did, in fact, occur,” Sirius says. He’s bouncing his right leg the way Remus knows he does when he’s nervous and Remus realizes he’s _missed_ Sirius, missed sitting together with him and listening to him bullshit with complete sincerity, pushing his hair out of his eyes and so desperately earnest. 

“But I could’ve- I mean I could have gone anywhere,” Sirius is trying to explain, and Remus decides to let him. “I could’ve not fucked my whole life up too, right. But I did all that shit- the Aurors, Mary- on purpose. I’m here on purpose, too.”

Remus thinks of saying something sarcastic and a little funny about accidental portkeys, but he doesn’t. The Sirius in front of him looks, frankly, terrified with his heart in his throat and Remus was always too kind with him .

“Can I be honest, just really honest?” Sirius asks and Remus has barely nodded before Sirius is barreling on. “I miss you, Moony. So much. And I know I don’t-,” he pauses, chokes, and Remus can’t breath, “James and I have talked about it a lot, honest- we both know we don’t have a right to your friendship but I miss it, and I miss you, and when everything in my life just, well...there was just no one else I wanted to talk to.”

Remus feels like he’s being stabbed, so slowly and tenderly it’s nearly ecstasy. “So you came to America?” he says, his voice a wreck, and Sirius nods. 

“I came to you,” Sirius says.

The inside of Remus’s head is silent. A car drives by in a whoosh and the city makes quiet noises all around them, the hum of the streetlights and the faint rumble of the metro. A woman walks by with her dog and the jangle of its leash breaks the spell that Sirius seems to have wordlessly cast, holding Remus hostage.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Remus admits. 

Sirius has not stopped looking at him, the grip of his gaze a fragmented embrace. “This is enough,” he says, like a promise.

“It can’t possibly be.”

“It’s not everything I want,” Sirius says. “But it’s more than I thought I’d get.”

Remus breaths, swallows. Looks out at the waning moon inching its way back to full and feels it in his bones, to the depth of his marrow. To be a beast, Remus often thinks, is to feel the pull of the world more strongly than anyone, to know that it is broken and unstoppable and all-devouring.

Remus stands up. “Come eat,” he says, tilting his chin towards the house. “It’s got to be ready by now.” 

The stew is rich and just right by the time they get it into mismatched bowls, and they eat it sitting cross-legged on opposite ends of the couch. Sirius makes a big show of saying how good it is and what a chef Remus is and Remus rewards them both by getting out a bottle of the six dollar red wine he buys as a treat for himself. When they’re finished, and a little drunk, Sirius insists on doing the dishes and Remus lies back on the couch and listens to the water running behind him, the hum of another living person in his space. He hasn’t felt lonely in this flat in the three years he’s lived here but it feels fuller, somehow, to know that Sirius is just there, behind the wall.

Remus doesn’t mean to fall asleep but he stirs when Sirius touches his shoulder. Remus rubs at his eyes with the heel of his palm and looks up into the curtain of Sirius’s hair and time contracts just then, knits itself together, and they could be fourteen and Sirius is waking him up for class after a long night. 

“Did you want to sleep here?” this older Sirius asks, his voice low. “Only, I know your back is a bitch if you don’t get to stretch out.”

“No, no, you’re right,” Remus says blearily, and he stumbles up and into Sirius’s waiting hands. It’s the most intentional physical contact they’ve had yet, and Sirius’s hands are warm against his arms and the small of his back as Remus rights himself and then remembers.

Sirius must see it happen, the way memory sours the corners of Remus’s eyes, because he lets go at once and steps back, careful and polite. Remus doesn’t know why he wants to scream.

“Good night, Sirius,” he says.

“Night, Moony,” Sirius says. No one has called Remus _Moony_ in two years and now Sirius has done it three times in twenty four hours. 

There’s too much to say, and all of it impossible, even the fragile question that worms itself together at the back of Remus’s tongue, the great reflection that _I don’t know if I can give you everything again and so maybe I can’t give you anything._

So Remus nods and holds his own arms and walks himself down the narrow hall to bed, intending to spend the next exhaustive hours tearing his brain and his heart apart but instead, almost instantly, falls asleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been thinking about this AU for ages and it's very thrilling to put pen to paper on it at last. I find Remus a much more intimidating POV than Sirius- he's just a very complicated boy. Excited as always to hear your thoughts, worries, and concerns <3  
> Please do not ask me to reckon with what I've done to the Longbottoms, I feel terrible about it I promise.


	2. Chapter 2

Remus wakes to the smell of bacon and the sight of Sirius Black in his kitchen, wearing a pair of grey sweats so old they’re worn in at the knees and using Remus’s frying pan like he’s always lived here.

“Hungry?” Sirius asks, as if he doesn’t know that for Remus the answer is always yes, and Remus hovers in the doorway just staring.

Sirius looks a bit embarrassed. “Sorry, you said make myself at home and I thought-”

“No, no, this is-” Remus says, flustered, “it’s really nice, Thank you.”

Sirius flushes. “Yeah, figured I should pull my weight around a little,” he says. Remus wants to tell him he doesn’t have to do anything to earn his place here, although they both know that’s a lie. 

They eat on the couch and Sirius says, “You need to get some kind of table,” between bites of what Remus will admit are the best scrambled eggs he’s ever had.

“Where would I even put it?”

“There’s space by the record player,” Sirius suggests, and Remus shrugs. 

“I’ve never needed one,” he says. Sirius eyes him, visibly weighing his words.

“No guests?” he asks. It’s the most roundabout way Remus has ever been asked if he’s seeing someone.

Remus shakes his head. “PhDs are hell; I barely get enough time to eat and sleep.”

Sirius’s eyes shift and Remus does not even want to consider what he’s thinking. Instead he changes the topic.

“What’s your plan today?” Remus asks, feeling a bit like a mum- the overbearing Remus he was at Hogwarts, and he sees Sirius think it too.

“Maybe a walk?” Sirius says. He puts his plate down on his knees and seems to steel himself for some kind of confrontation. “I’m not sure. And I want to just say, upfront, you’ve been nice enough to let me stay two nights but I don’t-”

“I meant it,” Remus cuts him off. “You can stay as long as you need.”

“Moony,” Sirius murmurs, and doesn’t go on.

Remus swallows. “I’m not...I don’t know how I feel, alright? About friendship, the war. Any of it. I’m not sure what I’ll be able to give you but...you can definitely have my couch.” He tries to smile then, and looks up to find Sirius staring at him with damp eyes.

“You fucking girl, don’t start crying,” Remus gets out and Sirius laughs, swiping at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “And you can buy groceries if you feel so beholden.”

“Happy to,” Sirius says and Remus ducks his head because eye contact now is something he’d need more than two minutes of honest communication to feel ready for.

He stops at a locksmith on his way home from campus to get a spare key made and on Friday he walks out of the library to find Sirius standing at the base of the steps, smoking one of his terrible clove cigarettes and clearly waiting for him, though he pretends to have just “been in the area” when Remus snatches the cigarette away to smoke it himself. 

Remus hasn’t had a roommate in four years and it’s a remarkable change of pace. In fairness, Sirius is a significantly more polite house guest than he ever was when they properly lived together after Hogwarts. Remus comes home three nights out of four to dinner and if Sirius isn’t out jogging in the morning, he’s got breakfast ready too. In the evenings they sit companionably in the living room, Remus with his head in some scholarly article and Sirius thumbing through a book he’s borrowed. Or they’ll have a bit too much wine with dinner and Remus will find himself on his front porch, reviving his smoking habit with a vengeance and reminiscing on the shit they pulled as third and fourth years. 

It’s dangerous, Remus knows. He’s not naïve enough to not realize he’s being sucked back into what he ran from. But it’s easy on those nights to not connect the strings between the Sirius in front of him now and the person who made Remus so miserable as to be nearly clinical during the war. This Sirius doesn’t push too far, doesn’t yell back at Remus when he’s being snippy or stops talking altogether when he wants Remus to cave. This Sirius does the dishes after dinner and puts out the bins and gives Remus a respectful sort of space. Twice, Remus comes home to find Sirius on the mirrors and both times he only murmurs a quick goodbye before putting them away, not speaking of it to Remus or even asking if Remus wants to say hi to James, in a remarkable display of tact that would have been unthinkable in the Sirius Remus had known in London.

On Thursday, after Sirius has been in Boston for nearly two week, Remus gets invited out to drinks with some of the other PhD students and, before he can make himself regret it, he steps into the bathroom and sends a Patronus to Sirius with the time and location. Sirius meets them at the bar during their second round, walking into the somewhat grimey student pub a few blocks from campus with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and an uncertain smile hovering around his mouth. He looks _shy_ , Remus thinks, lost curls tumbling into his face and searching for them in the low light as if unsure he's in the right place. Remus waves him over, not close to drunk but with enough of the edge off that this doesn’t feel like cliff-jumping, and moves over in the booth to introduce Sirius around.

“This is Gabby,” Remus says, starting left to right, “Romilda, Thomas, Vincent, and Rabastan. Sirius is my-” Remus pauses, trying to figure out how he could even quantify Sirius anymore. 

“We went to Hogwarts together,” Sirius says, which is good enough. “So nice to meet you all.” 

“Call me Stan,” Rabastan insists, and when Sirius shakes his hand, Remus can see them eying each other up. “You look much too familiar; are we related?”

“Probably,” Sirius says, and Gabby gets up to grab them the next round. Thomas is bitching about this article that was just published, and Remus is afraid they’ll lose Sirius, but Sirius is nodding along, chin on his knuckles as he listens intently.

“He sourced Gibbins!” Thomas complains. “Like we’re still writing in the 1450s. Everyone knows Gibbins was a bigot who got-”

“-cuckolded by a Kelpie, yes yes,” Vincent waves him off. “A theory for which you have continued to provide no proof-”

“You wanna give me an alternative explanation for what ‘left him to live by the sea’ means?”

“I keep telling you dude, Kelpies are freshwater dwellers-”

“And I keep telling you,” Thomas says, interrupting Stan, “That was only the result of speciest redlining; before the Beast Accords, Kelpies could live anywhere-”

“I’m with Thomas on this,” Sirius speaks up, his voice shivering down the back of Remus’s neck. “Having your spouse run off with a Kelpie wasn’t that uncommon, I don’t think. I have this great uncle like six generations back who tried to leave his estate to this Kelpie he met on holiday.”

“We are related!” Stan says and Gabbie returns with a massive pitcher that they make it through in less than twenty. 

Remus eventually forgets to be worried about Sirius, who is holding his own just fine- asking Romilda about the fieldwork she did this summer with Mermaids in the Sudan, and then eventually scooting over to swap family gossip with Stan who is, as it turns out, a distant Black cousin by marriage. 

“Not that it matters much anymore,” Stan shrugs, hands around his glass. “Mom got cut off when she married a Muggleborn. For the best anyway; they would’ve skinned me alive if they knew what I was studying.”

“I’m out too,” Sirius shares, and Remus tries to investigate how he says it, how Sirius holds those words against his tongue, but he seems to say it casually enough. Not casual the way Sirius used to fake it, sixth year when he’d arrived on the platform with the Potters and let Peter and Remus know, as if it was a great joke, what had happened in August. Not casual the way Sirius used to perform it during the war either, when he was making nice with Black relatives all over London in an attempt to get even the barest scraps of information.

He says it now like it’s just a piece of who he is, no more or less important than anything else about him. It’s the first thing to really convince Remus that Sirius wasn’t lying, that night on his porch, when he told Remus he’s a better person than he used to be.

“No shit,” Stan says. “What are you doing now?”

“Going through a bit of a life change,” Sirius says, and he looks over to smile at Remus. It hits Remus somewhere at the base of his belly. “Remus was nice enough to let me crash on his couch while I figure things out.”

Stan hisses sympathetically. “Well, as long as you’re in town, you should come out with us,” he offers. “If we haven’t bored you to death.”

“Far from it,” Sirius says, still looking at Remus, his eyes twinkling the way they only ever did for the four of them. 

Gabby calls it a night around eleven, and the rest of them soon follow suit. Romilda and Vincent duck into an alley to apparate home but it’s not too cold out and Remus has been sitting still all day so he suggests they walk.

It’s quiet between them as they walk past row houses and towards MIT. The November air is quick and fluid, it fits like water in Remus’s stomach. In the streetlights, Sirius is flush from the heat of the bar, and maybe from the drinks, and devastatingly handsome; the prettiest man Remus has even seen in real life.

“Thanks for inviting me,” Sirius says, as they pass through Lafayette Square. 

“Yeah, of course,” Remus says, as if it had been an obvious choice that had caused him no anxiety at all. As if Sirius really was just someone he went to Hogwarts with, sleeping on his couch while he went through a hard time. 

Sirius’s eyes are on the campus buildings around them. “You have a whole life here,” he says. Remus can’t make sense of his tone. 

“I do, yeah,” he says. He can see the Charles River just ahead of them, moving silent and cool in the darkness. “Did you think I’d just be alone out here, stewing in my own misery?”

It comes out sharper than Remus means it too, hoping it could at least be passed off as a joke even though he’s pretty sure he’s offended. He doesn’t mention that that’s exactly what Remus himself had thought he’d be doing too, when he’d first left London.

Joke or not, Sirius actually pauses in their walk. “No!” he says, practically insists and looking Remus dead in the eyes. “I didn’t-”

“It’s alright,” Remus says, anxious to start walking again.

“Honestly, I didn’t think about it,” Sirius says. He starts walking again and they make their way down to the entrance of Harvard Bridge. “That is, I mean. I thought about you a lot but not, um, everything else.”

Remus doesn’t respond to Sirius’s uncomfortable stumbling but it’s alright, the bridge is lovely even at night with its view of the basin and the trees already losing their autumnal colors. 

“I guess if I’d had to imagine it, I’d have pictured you getting drunk with a bunch of swots all the time, so I wasn’t too far off,” Sirius adds and the thought makes Remus chuckle.

“You did well with them,” he says, because it’s true and because he wants to say something nice to Sirius. “They’re a lot, the cohort.”

“They’re all so smart,” Sirius says. “You really belong with them.”

It’s such an earnest compliment that Remus doesn’t know how to respond. They cross the bridge to the sound of the water lapping at the concrete supports. Someone is jogging towards Cambridge and they move to the side to let him pass, their fingers brushing. The contact hits Remus like lightning and he doesn’t pull away for a long minute. 

“Have you thought about us?” Sirius asks suddenly. “The old gang?”

“Lily keeps me somewhat up-to-date.”

“Yeah,” Sirius says, who probably already knew that. Maybe Lily tells them all about her letters, what Remus writes back. It makes Remus feel shaky in a way he can’t emotionally qualify, to imagine his old friends still talking about him in that same living room in Godric's Hollow. “She's always worried about you, you know that.”

“Why'd you leave the Aurors?” Remus asks because he doesn't want to talk about Lily or any other piece of the life he left behind.

Sirius says nothing for a few minutes and Remus worries he’s pushed too far, even though he thinks he has a right to, since Sirius is sleeping on his couch and eating his food and also, several years ago but not long enough, thought Remus was spying for Voldemort. They walk down Massachusetts Avenue, Boston insisting on making itself pretty with its old buildings and intensely optimistic trees, until suddenly Sirius answers. 

“I signed up because Prongs did,” he says, which Remus knew. “We were all in the Order anyway and the only thing that mattered was the war and fighting Eaters however you could. After it...once that was over, I just stayed.”

He’s looking at the houses and the streets ahead when Remus glances over, the moonlight glancing against his jaw. Remus swallows; sticks his hands deeper in the pockets of his puffer.

“I didn’t even think about it, really,” Sirius speaks into the dark. “I never sat myself down and asked if I even really liked fighting. It was a thing to do, maybe, and everyone around me seemed to think it was a good idea and pretty noble so I just...kept doing it.”

Remus gets it. Those first months after the war he’d found himself doing the same, going to his minimum-wage job and pub nights and early-morning cleanup operations as the Order hunted down the last of the Death Eaters left after Voldemort had gone to ground. He’d go home for a handful of sleeping hours before waking up to do it again, never really stopping to think if he was even happy until it had all at once become too much.

“I mean for a while there, ages really,” Sirius is saying, and Remus does his best to refocus, “it was like everything I did was just about, erm, would this piss off my parents, you know?”

Remus laughs, even though it maybe isn’t funny, but those years certainly were, with Sirius determinedly listening to Muggle Rock and wearing mismatched clothes he bought from charity shops, as if trying to prove something to the whole world.

Sirius smiles too though, so maybe it is okay. “And then after I...left,” he says, diplomatically, “everything had to be like, does this prove I’m not like the family. So I never really stopped, I guess, and asked myself what I actually wanted to be doing. You know, as a real person in the world and not just someone running from a bad situation.”

He’s biting his lip the way Remus remembers Sirius always does when he’s, well, serious and doesn’t want to sound too intense. “That makes a lot of sense,” Remus says. Sirius nods, almost to himself.

“It’s funny, almost,” Sirius says. “I never wanted to think about them at all and yet they basically made every decision for me these past...well, almost a decade now, honestly. Especially after Reg," he watches Sirius swallow, "died. I don’t know how to explain it. You don’t look at something and maybe it doesn’t exist or, maybe, it’s the most important thing in your life.” 

They walk for a while in silence and Remus thinks the conversation is over. Above them, he can just make out the edges of some stars through the city smog and the light pollution. 

“It was the same, sorta. With Mary,” Sirius suddenly volunteers. “Not that- not to say she was anything like those vindictive cunts, not at all- just. We were together because we'd always been, you know, it was this thing we never looked at all that closely. I don’t know if either of us had ever actually bothered to figure out if it was even something we wanted.”

Remus had found out three or so months after Voldemort had vanished that the two of them had started sleeping together towards the very end of the war, long after Sirius had basically stopped talking to him. During the rebuilding, Sirius had moved into her flat and had left Remus alone in the one they'd shared. By that point it hadn’t felt like Sirius had lived there in over a year.

“I don't think I'd ever really been in love with her,” Sirius murmurs, so faintly Remus has to strain to catch it. “Which is an awful thing to say, and I wouldn't tell anyone who wasn't you or James, honest, but I think it's true. She was...this comfort, almost. During the worst parts of the war, when it didn’t feel like I had anything anymore.”

 _When you didn’t have me anymore_ Remus thinks, and then decides is somewhat unfair. He’d never been able to offer Sirius comfort sex, even when they were at their best. 

“Lily told me you were almost engaged,” Remus says, just as gently.

Sirius sighs, shoulders by his ears. “It would have been just another thing to do because we were already doing it,” he said. “And she wanted kids which, fuck, I don’t know if I’ll ever want, really, but definitely not now.”

They turn down Berkley and Remus almost wants them to keep walking forever, for them to stay in this universe where Sirius talks to him again like they’re best friends, taking a lap around the castle as Sirius would groan about whatever new drama was in his life and Remus would listen and feel lucky to be confided in.

“I was the one to end things but we were over for a while,” Sirius says. “We both knew it. I was just the one to do it, you know?”

Remus reaches out then and lets his hand rest on Sirius’s arm where it’s pressed against his side, holding him still for just a minute.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and means it. He’d forgotten, while wallowing in his own misery he will admit, that Sirius was also someone capable of feeling pain and being hurt. The Sirius in front of him now is hurting, he can read it like lettering in the lines of his posture and the pauses in his words, and Remus wants better for him. 

It feels impossible, to care about Sirius this deeply again after the years and fights and ocean-long silences, and still here he is.

Sirius looks down at Remus’s hand on him and then up to meet Remus’s eyes, catching them both in the world that used to exist just between the two of them.

“Thank you,” Sirius says. Remus wonders what exactly he’s been thanked for but then they keep walking and the streets change and suddenly, they're home.

Time passes; it always does. Remus grades papers, publishes his article, and, despite telling no one about it, comes home to find Sirius reading it in the living room, stretched out on the couch and flipping through the academic journal in rapt attention. Sirius, as he self-reports, goes running and buys groceries and makes friends with the upstairs neighbors who Remus has lived alongside for three years and has managed to exchange only a handful of words with. Remus comes home to perfectly-cooked meals, to the neighbor’s baby crawling around on the rug as Sirius babysits, to a cherry-wood table Sirius found at a rummage sale that looks brand new and nestles perfectly by the record player, just as Sirius had said it would. 

It’s too much and it’s nothing. Remus forgets what day it is, forgets how old he is. It’s the return of a phantom limb and some nights he lies in his bed and stares at the ceiling and wants to be furious but can’t anymore; it turns his stomach, makes him feel guilty and he doesn’t know why. He knows he was right to be angry then, that he had every right to cut the lot of them out of his life, but sometimes when his eyes catch Sirius’s, he forgets. 

“It’s the full tonight,” Sirius says over breakfast after he’s been in Boston almost a month, and Remus looks up at him over his toast. 

“So I’ve heard,” he says, with a twitch of his eyebrow, and he worries it comes off too snarky but Sirius seems pleased.

“What do you usually do?” Sirius asks.

“There’s a clinic, in Dorchester,” Remus volunteers and Sirius looks appalled so he adds, “It’s not terrible actually. Well maintained, and I know the other guys there.”

Sirius still looks a touch grey, and Remus knows he’s remembering the Ministry changing cells that Remus was forced to use after he’d registered, until Dumbledore had been able to provide “Proof of Safe Changing Facility” once he wanted Remus to start spending the fulls with possible ally packs across the UK. Remus had tried, at the time, to keep as many of those details to himself, but once he’d fractured his hip during a change and Sirius had needed to come get him. It’s one of his worst memories, falling in and out of consciousness on the cold, concrete floor and seeing Sirius above him, staring at the chains and the bars and looking like he’d only just realized Remus was a monster.

“The laws are better here,” Remus tries to explain. “Beasts are a protected status under this old legislation that came about after the Salem trials. I really don’t mind it and they’ve got, like, good biscuits.”

Sirius laughs but he still looks uneasy, his toast sitting neglected on his plate. “Is there...can I help with anything?” he asks.

He’s carefully not asking to do the change with Remus, which is smart because Remus thinks he might explode if Sirius were to be so bold, after all this time. They’d actually stopped doing the full together long before Remus moved to Boston- stopping around Remus’s nineteenth birthday and never picking it up again after the war. James had made his excuses, apologizing for the baby and for not being able to leave Lily alone with Harry so often. Sirius hadn’t even brought it up.

“No, but thank you,” Remus says still, wanting to reward him for this basic level of tact. “I’ll probably head there from work though, so you’ll be on your own for a night.”

“I’ll try not to burn the house down,” Sirius says, and they leave it there.

His muscles ache worse as the day goes on, and Remus finds himself growing more easily distracted as the sun shifts past noon. He has a meeting scheduled with Carmilla but she cancels it as soon as he walks into her office.

“I always forget,” she apologizes. “Go home and rest a bit.”

Normally Remus would, but Sirius is at home and he doesn’t want to see him before the moon. “Distraction would be helpful, actually,” Remus says, and so he sits in Carmilla’s office while they chat about his coursework and gossip about the other academics. Eventually, he has to start making his way out to Dorchester, and Carmilla sends him off with some chocolate she keeps in her desk drawer. Remus can’t prove she keeps it on hand just for him, but he’s never seen her give it to anyone else.

“You don’t have a shift tomorrow, do you?” she checks and when Remus shakes his head, she smiles. “Take the day off, please. I will be very cross if I see you on campus before Monday.”

“Yes Ma’am,” Remus promises. He eats the chocolate on the way to the apparition point and materializes in the designated corner of the clinic.

“Hey Remus,” Janet, the sweet-faced receptionist at the clinic greets him as Remus shakes himself off.

“Hi Janet, how’s your month been?” Remus asks, politely. He likes Janet, she’s professional and kind and she’s very good about giving them all privacy before and after the change. He’s thought about asking her out, once or twice, but figures if it went badly it would make the next four years pretty uncomfortable and that’s not really worth the risk.

“Same old,” Janet smiles. “How’s the dissertation going?”

“My proposal is due in three months so, about as well as it could be,” Remus says. There’s a jangle of bells as the front door opens and Sam walks in. She’s a muggle- Remus is the only werewolf at the clinic who can do magic as far as he knows- and a sophomore at Harvard. She and Remus have run into each other by the Yard and he always tries to be friendly. They’ve gotten coffee twice and he’s learned she was bitten her senior year of high school while camping. She asks him for advice sometimes, about being a werewolf, and every time it’s staggering to imagine someone coming to him of all people for guidance.

“Hey gramps,” Sam says. Remus hates this nickname. 

“Physics final go well?”

“Think so, don’t get my grades till Friday,” Sam says, and Remus waits while she signs in before they both wave to Janet and head down the staircase at the back to the room.

Remus wasn’t lying when he told Sirius it’s fine. The changing rooms are all clean and softly padded, with blanket piles and dog toys Remus had laughed at the first time he’d come here but now had to admit actually seemed to keep the wolf entertained. Around the halfway point of the change Janet, or whoever is on duty, will come and slip raw beef strips through the metal box in the door. Remus had been referred to the clinic by his department head, who'd known he was a werewolf from Dumbledore. It has a membership fee, which eats up a good chunk of Remus's stipend every month, but is undeniably worth it compared to his first few changes in the woods outside Boston, where he'd been terrified every night that this would be the time he woke up over a partially dismembered body. Two years in, Remus even has a room now that he thinks of as ‘his,’ with the same blanket nest and rope he gets every time. 

Clarence and Michael are already downstairs, chatting by the small table with tea and cookies, and they wave as he and Sam take the final step. Remus likes these people, likes the small-talk they make before moonrise and the tips they share with each other from their own experiences. In London, most of the other werewolves he’d met at the Ministry cells had been like him- bitter, mad at the world, and all pretty poor. Most had been homeless or between jobs and they’d all looked at each other with vague distrust. When Remus would turn, he’d hear them howling at each other in dissonant agony, and that fear would permeate the whole night.

It’s different here. There are no laws in the states about what jobs werewolves can and can’t have and no registry either- Americans, Remus has found, tend to regard any sort of compiling of personal data as deeply suspicious. All the werewolves Remus has met here have jobs, are housed, and it’s unsurprising what a difference that makes.

Michael claps him on the shoulder once Remus gets close enough. “Alright, Remus?” he asks and it’s so paternal Remus could weep. Michael, he’s learned, has two children- the second of whom was born after Michael had already been bitten. 

“Hanging in there,” Remus says, a very American phrase he’s learned and loves. “How’s Holly doing with the knee?”

“Good of you to remember, thank you,” Michael says, squeezing Remus’s shoulders. “A lot better; that cream you gave me worked wonders.”

“Anytime,” Remus says and they all pause to say hi to Patrick and his son Micah as they come down the stairs. The two of them were bit together about a year ago while on a field trip. Micah was only eight and sometimes Remus looks at him and sees himself at that age, already a werewolf for two years with him and his parents still desperately looking for an impossible cure. Patrick, if Remus can say so himself, seems to be handling the whole thing much better than his parents ever did.

“My man,” Michael calls to Micah- the kid is absolutely everyone’s favorite at the clinic- and Micah runs over to get his elaborate handshake. “You get that email I sent your dad, with the video?”

“It was sick!” Micah says and then a bell chimes that signals it’s only five minutes to moonrise. They all wish each other a good night and make their way to their rooms, Micah walking with Remus and Patrick to the end of the hall. The father and son share a room, and it had broken something inside Remus, something fragile he hadn’t known he still had, that first morning when he’d come out into the hallway and seen Micah through the room window curled up exhausted against his dad’s chest on the floor, Patrick holding his son in quiet comfort. 

“Have a good shift,” Patrick tells Remus, and Remus wishes them both the same. He closes the door to his little room and it locks itself from the outside. Slowly, methodically, Remus gets undressed and puts his clothes and his wand in the metal box built into the ceiling. There’s another chime once the moon has risen but Remus never hears it, already shifting in his skin and howling out of key with the voices in the basement. 

As the wolf takes over, it catches a familiar scent on the wind, thinks _pack, blood, the hound._ In those handful of seconds when Remus is both human and other, his mind conjures up the image of Sirius Black like a brilliant mirage. Both the wolf and Remus want his neck, want his skin, want to feel this brilliant, frustrating, inexplicable man begging beneath them for very different things that all amount to survival. In that hair-sliver of time, the wolf-Remus knows that it was right to leave London, it was wrong to let Sirius into his flat and his life and the wet corners of his very soul if Remus ever had any intention of surviving himself but it feels so good to let the scent of the dog come in from the cracks in the walls and fill his body like effervescent desire until just as suddenly the thought is lost to the violence of the change, the memory loss that comes from being the beast.


	3. Chapter 3

At moonset, Remus wakes up and gives himself a quick once-over to find no broken bones or major bruises. He’s exhausted, wrung out and put away wet the way he always seems to be after the moon these days, but only rest and proper feeding will fix that marrow-deep ache, he knows from experience. Liz, the clinic physician, peeks her head into the room just to see if he’s okay and Remus gives her his best thumbs up. 

“There’s someone waiting for you outside,” she says, adjusting her clipboard. “Very handsome.”

Remus isn’t sure how he feels. “Thanks,” he says, tugging his jeans on. A quick  _ tempus _ tells him it’s just past 5 in the morning. Sirius, Remus knows from experience, has a hard time getting up before noon if he can help it. 

He can hear Micah getting patched up as he heads down the hall, and he signs out with a yawning Janet before walking through the glass doors and finding Sirius standing there, leaning against the lamppost like he just happened to be in the neighborhood.

“This place looks fancy,” Sirius says, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket.

“I told you it’s nice,” Remus says, his tone low and scratchy the way it often gets after the moon. Sirius has got a paper cup in his hands and he holds it out to Remus who takes it and lets the warmth of it seep through the cup into the skin of his hands.

“Figured you might want tea,” Sirius says.

“Thanks,” Remus murmurs, and he lifts it to his lips to discover Sirius got the milk and sugar ratio just how he likes it.

“Do you wanna go home?”

“We could walk,” Remus suggests, even though he just wants to collapse into bed, but Sirius looks so pleased by the suggestion, so they wander down the street towards Franklin Park. Dorchester is clean and quiet so early in the morning, just the few joggers and bleary-eyed commuters. Growing up, Remus had an aunt with a house in the British Dorchester and, moving to Boston, he’d found the old name comforting. He’d understood then, really, why the old colonists had taken their place names with them when they’d immigrated. It felt nice to hold onto a small piece of home, flung as he was across the sea.

“How was it?” Sirius asks, voice a study in casual. Remus almost laughs but his ribs are still sore and his voice is nearly gone anyway. 

“Fine, yeah,” Remus says. “Nice of you to come pick me up.”

“Full moon I always-” Sirius starts, and then pauses. Remus can see him thinking, weighing his words. “I...think of you,” he says after a silence. “Full moon. It was nice to know right off you’re alright.”

Remus is so tired, it barely makes him angry. “You stopped doing the change with me long before I left England,” he says. He expects Sirius to deny it, or to excuse. Sirius does neither.

“I know,” he says softly. “It was fucked up. I’m sorry.”

Remus fumbles. “I didn’t- I never expected you to…”

“We made a promise, fifth year,” Sirius spares him. They enter the park just then, finding themselves surrounded by the sparse trees and rising grass hills. Remus looks out at the dirt road but he can feel Sirius looking at him, like they’d be making eye contact if Remus just turned his chin.

“I didn’t forget,” Sirius says. 

“Neither did I,” Remus breathes and then he turns.

Sirius is standing there, holding his tea, scarf covering the sharp angles of his jaw, and he’s watching Remus in a way impossible to dissect. Remus feels the grey of his stare in his bones, shivering down his arms and fingers and he wants to collapse into it, wants to fold himself small and fifteen and beheld by Sirius Orion Black, made special by that gaze- marked for better things. Remus has never forgotten what it means to be caught in Sirius’s orbit, the thrill and the fury of it and, standing in Franklin Park, Remus is drowning in it, gasping for air he doesn’t even want. 

Remus has never forgotten this feeling too. The complete confidence that it would be worth nothing at all to survive the maelstrom just to forever live bereft. 

The memory hits Remus like a semi-truck, because he’s exhausted and worn thin by lack of sleep and the change and whatever emotional terrorism Sirius has been wrecking in his house and in his heart ever since he’d shown up, of the very last time they did this stupid dance with each other- in the middle of the war when everything hadn't yet fallen to shit but the writing was on the wall. They were living together then, had been since James had moved out to marry Lily, and Peter had gotten his own place that they now knew had been bought with Death Eater funds, had been hooked up to the illegal Dark Mark network so he could more easily transfer information. But just then, that first and only kiss, they hadn't known any of that. 

It had been New Year's, and they'd just apparated back from James and Lily's very small holiday party that at times had felt more sad than exciting but had been lovely anyway. Harry had woken up around eleven and had been passed to all the adults to be held and cooed over, and then at midnight Sirius had reached over and grabbed Remus's face between his hands and kissed him as a joke. Everyone had laughed, even Remus had laughed because it was funny, it was a reminder of how close they all were to each other, and when the two of them had walked outside the wards to apparate back around one in the morning, Remus had still been smiling, had still been thinking about how lucky he was, how much he'd loved his friends. 

In their flat then, with Remus's back against the door, Sirius had looked down and had giggled and Remus had been pretty drunk, maybe they both had been, and Sirius had said  _ you look beautiful when you're smiling, you know _ and he'd kissed Remus again but it hadn't been a joke. It couldn't have been, with all their friends elsewhere and just the two of them alone in the world. Sirius's left hand had come up to cover Remus's ear, his right caught in the hem of Remus's jumper and Remus had let himself be kissed and had kissed back because it seemed like the polite thing to do and eventually Sirius had leaned back just enough to rest his mouth against Remus's shoulder.

_ I've always wanted  _ Sirius had said and then had let the words drift away from them both. After a while they went to their separate bedrooms and in the morning Moody's Patronus had shown up to tell them the Prewett brothers had both been murdered and there never really was the right time for Remus to sit Sirius down and ask  _ what did you mean, what was that about, because I think maybe I might feel the same, if you would only tell me how it is you feel _ and soon enough Sirius had stopped speaking to Remus anyway and the rumor in the Order was that Remus was the spy.

“Are you okay?” Sirius asks, must see something in Remus’s shoulders, and Remus wants to yell that he’s not, that he thought he was absolutely fine and then Sirius spun in and now nothing of his world is on stable ground but the words won’t come and, anyway, his voice is shot and so he only shakes his head.

“Just tired,” Remus murmurs, always the coward, and Sirius leads them behind the cover of the trees to take Remus’s hand and side-along them home. As they twist in the space between the air, Sirius’s hand on his wrist is Remus’s last anchor, and when they materialize outside the wards of Remus’s home the contact remains a beat too long, leaves Remus dizzy when Sirius finally pulls away.

“Sleep or food?” Sirius asks as they duck into the house. Remus can barely think, feels like he’s vibrating.

“I’ve gotten too old,” Remus manages around a yawn, toeing his shoes off in the entryway. 

Sirius snorts. “Sleep it is then,” he says, his hand on the small of Remus’s back. In the early dawn, Remus’s bedroom is bathed in soft light. Sirius gets him to the bed, then between the sheets. Remus feels out of sync with his own body, lost in time and exhaustion, and as Sirius pulls back, Remus lets his fingers skim the thin skin of Sirius’s wrist. 

“Were you outside all night?” Remus murmurs, eyes already half lidded. Under his index and thumb, Sirius’s pulse jumps. “I thought I smelled the dog.”

Sirius looks away. “Get some rest,” he says, and he slowly dislodges his arm from Remus’s light grasp.

Remus understands he’s stumbled into something important, that he needs to pay attention to whatever is brewing between them, has been overflowing and flooding his world for nearly a month, but the pull of sleep is too strong and his eyes slip closed without his permission. Remus feels, or imagines- he can’t tell, the gentle pressure of something running through the hair by his ear and then he’s out.

  
  


Saturday is a wash. Remus spends much of the afternoon asleep, waking up around five or six because his stomach is growling, and he barely gets himself sitting upright before his bedroom door opens and Sirius peeks in, asking if he wants soup. 

They eat in Remus’s bed, Remus propped up against the headboard and Sirius cross-legged by the foot of the bed, making soft conversation as the light fades outside. The soup is potato and Sirius has, unsurprisingly, done an unbelievable job.

“When did you learn to cook?” Remus asks, has been wondering for weeks. When they lived together during the war Sirius could barely manage beans on toast.

Sirius shrugs. “Like a year ago,” he says. “When everything started feeling...wrong, I thought maybe I just needed a hobby.”

Remus chuckles. “Cooking didn’t work?” he teases.

“Nope,” Sirius shakes his head, beginning to smile. “Neither did running, or swimming, or gardening.”

“Not gardening?”

Sirius laughs. “It was devastating,” he says lightly. “Lily even got me an adult coloring book last Christmas.”

Remus smiles at the thought. “No one can say you didn’t try,” he says, only realizing how serious of a statement it is once it’s out. They go quiet around their bowls and Remus plays with his spoon, scraping it against the side.

Finally, he looks back up and really tries to see Sirius, this old but new person who’s rematerialized into his life. “It sounds like you’ve had a year,” Remus says, trying to be kind.

“Yeah well,” Sirius says, “feels like it’s been ten, you know.”

Remus nods, because he does. They were boys- James and Peter too- and then suddenly they were in a war and everyone they knew was dying. It’s a wonder they all didn’t make it out more fucked up. Honestly, Remus thinks, some of them didn’t.

“Moony,” Sirius says suddenly, and then pauses. Remus looks up, lets their eyes catch, and all at once he’s terrified of what Sirius might say. But Sirius only swallows and asks, “How’s your back doing?”

Remus twinges just remembering it. “Like shit,” he says honestly. Sirius puts his bowl on the windowsill and crawls out of the bed. 

“I’ll draw you a bath,” Sirius says and vanishes down the hall before Remus can object.

The bath is magnificent- Sirius has gotten the water just hot enough and the air smells like lilacs somehow. Remus almost falls asleep again just resting in the tub. He hasn’t been cared for like this after the moon since Hogwarts, or maybe since that first year out of school, when the four of them had still been doing the change together. Which isn’t to say, Remus thinks, that things have been miserable for him. Sirius is right, Remus has a whole world here but somehow it all pales in the gaze and attention of Sirius Black. 

When he gets out, Remus finds his towel and his pyjamas hanging on the bathroom door and caught in a warming charm, and it’s heaven to slip them on. He feels like he floats out to his living room, and he’s barely sat down on the couch before Sirius follows, carrying tea mugs for them both. Remus takes his first sip as Sirius sits down across facing him and, unexpectedly, wants to weep.

“You’re being so kind to me,” Remus asks, only it doesn’t come out like a question, his voice low and still mostly gone.

Sirius seems startled. “I didn’t,” he starts, and then abandons it. “Is it too much?”

“No, it’s,” Remus tries, can’t find the words. 

Sirius watches him and Remus can see his breath caught in his throat. He knows what’s happening here, or maybe he doesn’t, but there’s nothing he can do about it now but let it run its course. 

“It’s nice,” Remus says finally, and the smile that blooms across Sirius’s mouth is enough to crush him. 

They sit for a while, just sipping their tea and listening to the R.E.M album Sirius put on while Remus was in the bath,  _ Chronic Town  _ it sounds like, and then eventually Remus starts yawning again and Sirius is the first to grab Remus’s empty mug before it slips from his slackening hands.

“Maybe it’s bedtime,” Sirius suggests.

Remus laughs. “Yeah, maybe,” he says but they still sit on the couch until the album ends, just existing with each other. Once the silence at the end of the record begins to spiral, Remus finally gets up.  “Well, goodnight then,” he says, and Sirius looks up to meet his eyes. 

“Night Moony,” Sirius says. 

Remus means to turn and leave, shifts his weight to do just that, and then suddenly before he can even think it through he looks right through Sirius and hears himself say, “You can sleep in my room. If you want.”

Sirius’s whole body goes still and Remus could blame this on the moon, on the late hour, but Remus is here now and he doesn’t actually regret this, not yet, so he finishes his offer. “I know the couch isn’t that comfortable,” Remus says, amazed at how steady his voice is. “And it’s a full bed, so. If you want. I don’t mind.” 

On the couch Sirius is still staring at him like he’s not sure this isn’t a trick. Finally, he seems to get it together enough to answer.

“Yeah that’d-” Sirius starts, and has to stop to clear his throat, his voice cracking. “That’d be nice, thank you.”

“Alright,” Remus says, and then, as if it hardly matters whether Sirius follows him, turns and heads down the hall to the bathroom to brush his teeth. 

It takes him almost no time at all to finish getting ready for bed, and when Remus comes out of the bathroom, Sirius is waiting to do the same. Remus ducks out of his way and into the bedroom, and as he gets into his bed he can hear the sound of the water running over the uncertain beat of his heart.

Objectively, Remus thinks, it’s not that weird. They shared beds all through Hogwarts, over summer holidays and road trips and nights when they were all too drunk to figure out who was meant to sleep where. And Remus’s bed is large enough for each of them to have their own side, to not even touch if they didn’t want to-  _ and why would we want to?  _ Remus thinks wildly- and the couch really isn’t that comfortable even though Sirius has been sleeping on it without complaint for nearly a month now. 

His skin feels too hot and he’s just considering opening the window when the bedroom door opens and Sirius is standing there, bathed in the hall light and trying to look as unbothered as Remus hopes he looks too. Remus watches him make his way across the floorboards, watches him climb into the bed and the open, empty side, and then it’s just them lying still between the sheets, listening to the other try to breathe.

“Is this-” Sirius’s voice starts to speak into the darkness, but Remus cuts him off.

“It’s been nice to have you here,” Remus says. It comes from nowhere but Remus means it, he thinks. It’s been nice today especially but the whole month has been nice and he doesn’t know what to do about it but this doesn’t feel like a misstep.

Next to him, he hears Sirius exhale. “It’s been nice to be here,” Sirius says.

Remus can feel the heat of Sirius slowly permeating through the bed, and before he can regret it, Remus lets his hand glide through the blankets until it finds Sirius’s. At the contact, Sirius flinches, but Remus keeps reaching and eventually gets their fingers tangled together, just holding hands under the covers, both of them on their backs and staring at the darkened ceiling.

Sirius’s skin is soft and cold but warming in Remus’s grasp, and after a while his thumb begins to stroke just gently up and down the back of Remus’s hand. It feels nice, Remus thinks. 

Eventually, he falls asleep.

Remus wakes once in the night to find a knee in his hipbone. It’s dark outside and he twists away but next to him Sirius’s moans low and moves too, becomes a warm wall at Remus’s back, and Remus slips back into sleep. 

When he wakes up next, the sun is shining faintly through the shades, landing in slats across his bedsheets. It must be cold out, Remus can hear the heat hissing up through the radiator, but underneath the covers there’s sweat sticking to the backs of his knees and the bottoms of his feet. Remus blinks, coming to himself slowly, and turns over to find Sirius right there. Sirius’s eyes are closed, eyelashes a brush against the dark wells under his eyes, his right arm flung up near his face, flush staining the tops of his cheeks. His skin looks sleep-soft and Remus finds himself just watching, almost absently, the slight twitches of Sirius’s mouth as he breathes in his sleep. Remus hasn’t had another person in his bed in almost six months and he’s forgotten the precious awkwardness of this moment, the seconds that hover in suspended animation and trail out into the perfect stretch of the hours. 

Sirius opens his eyes. 

“Hi,” Remus murmurs, feeling caught out. Sirius blinks, stretches his arm up towards the headboard, back arching off the bed, before settling back down and meeting Remus’s unwavering gaze with his own, soft one.

“Wotcher Moony,” Sirius says, his voice scratched up and so low Remus can feel it vibrate through his bones.

“How’d you sleep?”

“I dreamt about you,” Sirius sighs.

Remus can’t stop looking at his mouth, his whole body aware of Sirius’s just beside him. At the foot of the bed, their ankles bump. “Did you?”

“It was a nice dream,” Sirius says, smiling so earnestly. It’s like sunlight. “We were at Hogwarts and it was snowing.”

“I also dreamt of snow,” Remus breathes into this impossible space between them. 

“Maybe you really were in my dream,” Sirius says.

It’s such a fucking line, and Remus laughs, can’t help but indulge it, say, “Maybe I was.” Sirius is just there and he’s smiling still and Remus’s mouth is humming with silly nothing giggles and then Sirius reaches across the bare centimeters between them with his free hand to run his thumb down the line of Remus’s cheek and it’s over. Maybe it’s been over since Remus found him on the front steps of his flat.

His thumb catches on the swell of Remus’s bottom lip and Remus can’t do anything but lie there and be touched by Sirius Black. It’s torture and it’s effortless. 

There was a time, deep in the middle of the war, when Remus had been so lonely and so scared, that he’d broken the one rule he’d set for himself when he was first figuring out the mess of his sexuality at school, and had wanked over the mental image of Sirius Black. The Sirius his raging mind had cobbled together had been domineering and smug, telling Remus how to touch himself and suck a cock and as soon as Remus had come he’d felt sick and guilty and disgusted with himself, and had sworn never to do it again. He had, of course- going back to the fantasy when nothing else would shut his mind up enough to let himself fall asleep and every time he’d felt worse and worse, but it had become the standard for how Remus imagined Sirius would be in bed. Forceful and a little mean, calling Remus a handful of names and pushing past what Remus likely would have been comfortable with had it been real sex with a real person.

The Sirius in Remus’s bed now, across an ocean in Boston with his thumb at the edge of Remus’s mouth, his ankle pressed against Remus’s, both of them sober and stretched out and glowing in the early morning light, is nothing at all like that. He’s gentle with his touches to the point of madness and Remus feels the edges of himself collapse inward like a dying star, an apocalyptic collision, and lets himself lean into the touch.

It all happens in barely-there shifts, millimeters of movement. Their noses brush, their foreheads bump, and Sirius takes nothing, demands nothing, and when his lips meet Remus’s, they both gasp and Sirius’s fingers tighten against his cheek. 

“This okay?” Sirius whispers and Remus almost doesn’t hear it before he’s nodding and Sirius is right back in his space, mouths opening, the wet slide of Sirius’s tongue just inside his mouth before it’s gone and Remus is chasing it back, intoxicated by the back and forth of Sirius’s fingers on his skin, the tight hitch of his breathing.

Sirius’s mouth is sour with morning breath and it’s a bare sliver of clarity when Remus pulls back to laugh, his nose resting against Sirius’s cheek.

“Your mouth tastes awful,” he murmurs, and Sirius laughs too, moves his other hand to pull Remus back in by his sleep-shirt.

“That’ll go away,” Sirius promises and comes back in to take Remus’s mouth again.

They kiss enough that the taste dissipates, that it just becomes the taste of skin. Remus is only just awake, resting on a modicum of awareness and totally lost to hedonistic lust, firmly in his body and shivering with desire. He gets a knee between Sirius’s legs and the body around him is sleep-warm and soft, pliable as they move together. Remus doesn’t even notice he’s pressing, hips barely undulating, until Sirius moans low and desperate between them.

“Is this-” Remus tries to ask and Sirius nods while kissing him, bringing his body back in, and Remus can feel how hard Sirius is against his leg. 

It feels almost like two different worlds- the upper halves of their bodies lost in the softest presses, the gentlest kisses, hesitant hands holding satin skin, the lower halves eager and straining, undeniably erotic. Sirius’s tongue slides against his own, slick and thrilling. It feels untouchable, dreamlike, as Remus twists and sways and gets them into a hesitant rhythm that shatters when Sirius jerks and comes suddenly in his pyjama pants, breaking away from Remus’s mouth to gasp into his shoulder.

Remus’s heart is still beating double-time, and the way Sirius’s eyes had blown open when he came is almost too much to bear. Sirius grins up at him, flushed and embarrassed. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to,” he says and Remus shakes his head.

“No, no, it was,” Remus tries. “Um, it was hot.”

“Was it?” Sirius asks, sounding pleased, and moves his left hand between them to press his heel into Remus’s own erection. Remus groans and Sirius pauses at his waistband, asks “Can I?” and Remus isn’t sure what he’s agreeing to but involuntarily throws his head back and has to remember how to breath as Sirius gets a hand down his pants and jerks him off slowly and tightly until Remus wants to scream but comes instead. 

Sirius vanishes the mess while Remus comes back to earth, static loud and ringing in his ears. When it doesn’t feel like he’s outside of his body anymore, Remus lets his nose brush Sirius’s until they kiss again, sweet-tongued and exhausted. Sirius can’t seem to stop touching him, running his knuckles up and down Remus’s jaw, brushing stray locks back from his face, and Remus has no intention of stopping him, leaning into the contact like a plant seeking sun.

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep, planning to spend at least the next hour or the early morning watching Sirius’s face, petting his cheek maybe or breathing into the shivers of his body as it comes down, but somehow Remus finds himself passing out in the afterglow anyway, mouth still raw with Sirius’s index pressed against his lower lip in cautious possession.

When Remus next wakes up, the bed is empty. 


End file.
